VOLUME XXII, NO. 33 AUGUST 13, 1969 BUDDHIST [This article by E. F. Schumacher is reprinted Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what from the English magazine, Resurgence (published they look like when viewed by a modern six times a year), for January-February, 1968 (Vol. I, and a Buddhist economist. No. 11). For subscribers in the United States Resurgence is $3.00 a year and may be ordered post- There is universal agreement that the free from the publisher at 24 Abercorn Place, St. fundamental source of wealth is human labour. John's Wood, London, N.W.8, England.] Now, the modern economist has been brought up to RIGHT LIVELIHOOD is one of the requirements of consider "labour" or work as little more than a the Buddha's . It is clear, necessary evil. From the point of of the therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to Economics. be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of Buddhist countries, at the same time, have often view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to stated that they wish to remain faithful to their make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and heritage. So Burma: "The New Burma sees no wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. conflict between religious values and economic Hence the ideal from the point of view of the progress. Spiritual health and material well-being employer is to have output without employees, and are not enemies: they art natural allies.''1 Or: "We the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to can blend successfully the religious and spiritual have income without employment. values of our heritage with the benefits of modern technology"2 Or: "We Burmans have a sacred duty The consequences of these attitudes both in to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. theory and in practice are, of course, extremely far- This we shall ever do."3 reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of it, every method that "reduces the work load" All the same, such countries invariably assume is a good thing. The most potent method, short of that they can model their economic development automation, is the so-called "division of labour" and plans in accordance with modern economics, and the classical example is the pin factory eulogized in they call upon modern from so-called 's Wealth of Nations. Here it is not a advanced countries to advise them, to formulate the matter of ordinary specialization, which mankind has policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand practised from time immemorial, but of dividing up design for development, the Five-Year Plan or every complete process of production into minute whatever it may be called. No one seems to think parts, so that the final product can be produced at that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist great speed without anyone having had to contribute economics just as the modern materialist way of life more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, has brought forth modern economics. unskilled movement of his limbs. Economists themselves, like most specialists, The Buddhist point of view takes the function of normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to absolute and invariable truths, without any pre- overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other suppositions. Some go as far as to claim that people in a common task; and to bring forth the economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or and services needed for a becoming existence. "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, Again, the consequences that flow from this view are however, get involved in arguments of methodology. endless. To organize work in such a manner that it

MANAS Reprint - LEAD ARTICLE 2 becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve- an excellent background for man to display his scale 5 racking for the worker would be little short of of values and develop his personality. criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion in a desperate position, not simply because he lacks and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the an income but because he lacks this nourishing and most primitive side of this worldly existence. enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work can replace. A modern economist may engage in would be considered a complete misunderstanding of highly sophisticated calculations on whether full one of the basic truths of human existence, namely employment "pays" or whether it might be more that work and leisure are complementary parts of the "economic" to run an economy at less than full same living process and cannot be separated without employment so as to ensure a greater mobility of destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure. labour, a better stability of wages, and so forth. His From the Buddhist point of view, there are fundamental criterion of success is simply the total therefore two types of mechanization which must be quantity of goods produced during a given period of clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man's skill time. "If the marginal urgency of goods is low," says and power and one that turns the work of man over Professor Galbraith in The Affluent Society, "then so to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of is the urgency of employing the last man or the last having to serve the slave. How to tell the one from million men in the labour force." And again: "If . . . the other? "The craftsman himself," says Ananda we can afford some in the of Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk stability—a proposition, incidentally, of impeccably about the Modern West as the Ancient East, "the conservative antecedents—then we can afford to craftsman himself can always, if allowed to, draw the give those who are unemployed the goods that delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. enable them to sustain their accustomed standard of 6 The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding living." warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing round them by the craftsmen's fingers; but the power the truth on its head by considering goods as more loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer important than people and as more of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially important than creative activity. It means shifting the 4 human part of the work." It is clear, therefore, that emphasis from the worker to the product of work, Buddhist economics must be very different from the that is, from the human to the subhuman, a surrender economics of modern materialism, since the to the forces of evil. The very start of Buddhist Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a would be a planning for full multiplication of wants but in the purification of employment, and the primary purpose of this would human character. Character, at the same time, is in fact be employment for everyone who needs an formed primarily by a man's work. And work, "outside" job: it would not be the maximization of properly conducted in conditions of human dignity employment nor the maximization of production. and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally Women, on the whole, do not need an "outside" job, their products. The Indian philosopher and and the large-scale employment of women in offices economist J. C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as or factories would be considered a sign of serious follows: economic failure. In particular, to let mothers of If the nature of the work is properly appreciated young children work in factories while the children and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the run wild would be as uneconomic in the eyes of a higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It Buddhist economist as the employment of a skilled nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him worker as a soldier in the eyes of a modern to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his economist. freewill along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes

Volume XXII, No. 33 Reprint August 13, 1969 3

While the materialist is mainly interested in in short, tries to maximize human satisfactions by the goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries But is "The " and therefore in to maximize consumption by the optimal pattern of no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be pleasurable things but the craving for them. The much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is drive for maximum consumption. We need not be simplicity and non-violence. From an economist's surprised, therefore, that the pressure and strain of point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life living is very much less in, say, Burma than it is in is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results. of labour- machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of the amount used For the modern economist this is very difficult in the latter. to understand. He is used to measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual Simplicity and non-violence are obviously consumption, assuming all the time that a man who closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, consumes more is "better off" than a man who producing a high degree of human satisfaction by consumes less. A Buddhist economist would means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows consider this approach excessively irrational: since people to live without great pressure and strain and consumption is merely a means to human well-being, to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well- "Cease to do evil; try to do good." As physical being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of their needs by means of a modest use of resources temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, are obviously less likely to be at each other's throats the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest than people depending upon a high rate of use. possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that local communities are less likely to get involved in involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less large-scale violence than people whose existence toil there is, the more time and strength is left for depends on world-wide systems of trade. artistic creativity. It would be highly uneconomic, From the point of view of Buddhist economics, for instance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like therefore, production from local resources for local the modern West, when a much more beautiful effect needs is the most rational way of economic life, can be achieved by the skilful draping of uncut while dependence on imports from afar and the material. It would be the height of folly to make consequent need to produce for export to unknown material so that it should wear out quickly and the and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and height of barbarity to make anything ugly, shabby or justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small mean. What has just been said about clothing scale. Just as the modern economist would admit applies equally to all other human requirements. The that a high rate of consumption of transport services ownership and the consumption of goods is a means between a man's home and his place of work to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic signifies a misfortune and not a high standard of life, study of how to attain given ends with the minimum so the Buddhist economist would hold that to satisfy means. human wants from far-away sources rather than from Modern economics, on the other hand, considers sources nearby signifies failure rather than success. consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all The former might take statistics showing an increase economic activity, taking the factors of production— in the number of ton/miles per head of the population land, labor, and capital—as the means. The former, carried by a country's transport system as proof of

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 4 economic progress, while to the latter—the Buddhist one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water- economist—the same statistics would indicate a power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. highly undesirable deterioration in the pattern of Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are consumption. indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. Another striking difference between modern To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of economics and Buddhist economics arises over the violence, and while complete non-violence may not use of natural resources. Bertrand de Juvenal, the be attainable on this earth, there is none the less an eminent French political philosopher, has ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non- characterized "Western man" in words which may be violence in all he does. taken as a fair description of the modern economist: He tends to count nothing as an expenditure, Just as a modern European economist would not other than human effort; he does not seem to mind consider it a great economic achievement if all how much mineral matter he wastes and, far worse, European art treasures were sold to America at how much living matter he destroys. He does not attractive prices, so the Buddhist economist would seem to realise at all that human life is a dependent insist that a population basing its economic life on part of an ecosystem of many different forms of life. non-renewable fuels is living parasitically, on capital As the world is ruled from towns where men are cut instead of income. Such a way of life could have no off from any form of life other than human, the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not revived. permanence and could therefore be justified only as a This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of purely temporary expedient. As the world's things upon which we ultimately depend, such as resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil and water and trees.7 natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it enjoins a reverent and non-violent attitude not only to is clear that their exploitation at an ever increasing all sentient beings but also, with great emphasis, to rate is an act of violence against nature which must trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a inevitably lead to violence between men. tree every few years and look after it until it is safely This fact alone might give food for thought even established, and the Buddhist economist can to those people in Buddhist countries who care demonstrate without difficulty that the universal nothing for the religious and spiritual values of their observance of this rule would result in a high rate of heritage and ardently desire to embrace the genuine economic development independent of any materialism of modern economics at the fastest foreign aid. Much of the economic decay of South- possible speed. Before they dismiss Buddhist East Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect they might wish to consider whether the path of of trees. economic development outlined by modern Modern economics does not distinguish economics is likely to lead them to places where they between renewable and non-renewable materials, as really want to be. Towards the end of his its very method is to equalize and quantify courageous book, The Challenge of Man's Future, everything by means of a price. Thus, taking Professor Harrison Brown of the California Institute various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood or water of Technology gives the following appraisal: power: the only difference between them recognized Thus we see that, just as industrial society is by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent fundamentally unstable and subject to reversion to unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be agrarian existence, so within it the conditions which preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and offer individual freedom are unstable in their ability to avoid the conditions which impose rigid "uneconomic." From a Buddhist point of view, of organization and totalitarian control. Indeed, when course, this will not do; the essential difference we examine all of the foreseeable difficulties which between non-renewable fuels like coal and oil on the threaten the survival of industrial civilization, it is

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 5

difficult to see how the achievement of stability and NOTES the maintenance of individual liberty can be made compatible.8 1. Pyidawtha, The New Burma (Economic and Social Board., Government of the Union of Burma, 1954, p. 10). Even if this were dismissed as a long-term 2. Ibid., p. 8. view—and in the long term, as Keynes said, we are 3. Ibid., p. 128. all dead—there is the immediate question of whether 4. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi "modernization," as currently practiced without (Ganesh and Co., Madras, p. 30). regard to religious and spiritual values, is actually 5. C. Kumarappa Economy of Permanence (Sarva- producing agreeable results. As far as the masses Seva-Sangh Publication, Rajghat, Kashi, 4th ed., 1958, p. are concerned, the results appear to be disastrous—a 117). collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of 6. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Penguin, unemployment in town and country, and the growth 1962, pp. 272-273). of a city proletariat without nourishment for either 7. Richard B. Gregg, A Philosophy of Indian body or soul. Economic Development (Navajivan Publishing House, It is in the light of both immediate experience Ahmedabad, 1958, pp. 140-41). and long-term prospects that the study of Buddhist 8. Harrison Brown, The Challenge of Man's Future economics could be recommended even to those who (The Viking Press, New York, 1954, p. 255). believe that is more important than 9. F. Schumacher, "Rural Industries" in India at any spiritual or religious values. For it is not a Midpassage (Overseas Development Institute, London, 1964). question of choosing between "modern growth" and "traditional stagnation." It is a question of finding the 10. F. Schumacher, "Industrialisation through Intermediate Technology" in Minerals and Industries, right path of development, the Middle Way between Vol. I, No. 4. (Calcutta, 1964). materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, 11. Vijay Chebbi and George McRobie, Dynamics of in short, of finding "Right Livelihood." District Development (SIET Institute, Hyderabad, That this can be done is not in doubt. But it 1964). requires much more than blind imitation of the materialist way of life of the so-called advanced countries.9 It requires above all, the conscious and systematic development of a Middle Way in technology, of an "intermediate technology," as I have called it,10, 11 a technology more productive and powerful than the decayed technology of the ancient East, but at the same time non-violent and immensely cheaper and simpler than the labour- saving technology of the modern West.

E. F. SCHUMACHER London ______

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 6

REVIEW From this beginning the "Buddhist Revival" branches out into a vast maze of highways and AND THE WEST byways, and the ordinary Western reader, who is likely to be ignorant of Chinese geography, THERE are timeless questions hidden beneath the culture, and history, can hardly find his way, even historical matters investigated with great care and with Mr. Welch's untiring help. Yet with careful impartiality by Holmes Welch in the second reading and some skipping back and forth, a volume of his three-volume study of Chinese pattern emerges, and it is then that the reader Buddhism. The first volume, on the practice of senses the presence of the "timeless questions" we Chinese Buddhism, has had notice in these pages spoke of at the start. Why, for one thing, did The (MANAS, Oct. 18, 1967), and the third, which Awakening of the Faith stir Yang Wen-hui to will deal with what happened to Buddhism in lifelong commitment? Knowing the form but not China under Communist rule, is yet to appear. the spirit of what he did leaves out the essence of The book at hand, The Buddhist Revival in China history. We cannot blame Mr. Welch for this. If (Harvard University Press, 1968, $11.95), is we must blame anyone or anything, the culprit is concerned with the efforts of Chinese Buddhists the entire theory of knowledge under which to survive and to expand their influence during the Western scholarship operates. Some Buddhists century 1850-1950—a period of extraordinary might feel this way about it, which is one reason change and disturbance throughout the Far East. why they have had such a hard time "surviving" in It is probably a mistake to praise any book as modern times. They might argue that the reader "without bias," since even the most careful ought to respond to the impulse to put down Mr. observers are still fallible human beings, but one Welch's book and to seek out the text that moved can safely say of Mr. Welch's work that it is Yang, hoping to feel for himself what Yang felt. without animus, and he is certainly interested in And, indeed, how else is this history to be doing even justice to Chinese Buddhists, and in understood from the inside? redressing wrongs done by the religious if In 1893, a generous Baptist missionary, scholarly prejudice of earlier days. Timothy Richard, brought Yang into contact with The activity to which this volume is devoted Anagarika , a young Ceylonese began to make itself felt in the 1860's, when Yang Buddhist who had founded the Maha Bodhi Wen-hui, a young Chinese of exceptional Society to further a renewal of Buddhist thought. character, found in a bookstore in Hangchow a The two workers for Buddhism apparently kept in copy of The Awakening of the Faith in the touch and in 1908 Yang received a letter from . Reading it changed his life. This Dharmapala "agreeing that they should make a inspiration lifted him above certain personal common effort to revive Buddhism in order to frustrations and dilemmas and thereafter his spread it throughout the world." This motive energies and all the resources he could spare were would color a great many of the later happenings given to learning, teaching, and spreading described in Mr. Welch's narrative. Buddhist doctrines. He organized a print shop Again there is the question of the animating and issued book after book himself, until his power of such intentions. How shall we grasp the were gone. He obtained scholarly help in quality of this underlying resolve and recognize its England from associates of Max Müller and sold continuing presence, however attenuated, diluted, the scientific instruments he brought home to or even vulgarized in later years, without reading, China to get the money to print more Buddhist say, the autobiography of Dharmapala as it has texts. appeared, chapter by chapter, in the Maha Bodhi

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 7

Journal over a long period of years? The purity scholarship, and as the invasion of China by of this man's purpose ought to be understood as a Christian evangelists and missionaries led to the idea kind of historical force. of training Buddhist evangelists and sending missionaries to India and the West. Up to this point, We might propose some kind of rule for the only laymen were involved. The monks, isolated and study of great religious movements. Should one, secure in their monasteries, carried on as usual. But for example, permit himself to form judgments of in the last decade of the Ch'ing dynasty, when moves were made to confiscate their property for use in Gandhi's career and its influence on Indian history secular education, the monks began to organize without spending hours with the Bhagavad-Gita, schools and social-welfare enterprises as a means of and without careful attention to Tolstoy and self-defense. They too began to be aware of the need Ruskin and Thoreau? It seems entirely reasonable to counter the denigration of Buddhism, to which to say that no one can hope to understand what Christian missionaries had added a new dimension. Gandhi thought and did without at least an effort The fall of the Ch'ing in 1911 removed the to see through his eyes and to feel what he felt. checks both on confiscation and on private And Gandhi is a crucial key to modern Indian organization. Parties, lobbies, and clubs were springing up everywhere. It was logical for the history—and, incidentally, to the Buddhist revival monks to form a lobby to protect their property and in Gautama's native land. for laymen to start clubs that could serve as centers How many particulars of history would one for studying and spreading the dharma and provide members with what Christian laymen could get at the need to amass for generalizing purposes in order YMCA. All these efforts, clerical and lay, expanded to determine by inference the quality of the and interacted over the next forty years, reaching a inspiration which, however remotely, underlies peak that was cut off by the Japanese invasion of them all? Such questions are too big to handle 1937. . . . here. Yet when the subject is the world-moving The Western impact on China exacerbated the influence of , they ought to be sense of intellectual insecurity that was common near asked. the end of a dynasty. (It was during such a time of troubles that Buddhism had first taken hold.) In Mr. Welch finds, in consideration of what his particular the contact with Western religion made researches reveal, that the title of his book may be some Chinese dissatisfied with the latitude and misleading—an idea owing more to his fuzziness of their own religious tradition, in which predecessors in the field than to his own most people were partly Confucian, partly Buddhist, partly Taoist. . . . The lay Buddhist movement conclusions. Three currents of religio-philosophic burgeoned. . . . To choose Buddhism in a search for culture pervade China—Buddhist, Taoist, and religious identity meant that one was choosing to be Confucian. The influence of Buddhism, which is Chinese. It was an expression of cultural loyalism, a everywhere, was sought by the Chinese, who sent denial that things Chinese were inferior. Many of men of learning to India to obtain instruction. The those who chose Buddhism were content to take it as it was. Others felt a need to change it into something interpretation of a "Buddhist Revival" was made that commanded greater respect, both from foreigners by Westerners who saw what the Buddhists were and from their own countrymen. This brought doing in order to survive the impact of the cultural royalism into conflict with the need for European invasion of China, the effects of which status—another thread that runs through the Buddhist worked at various levels. Mr. Welch writes in revival. The need for status—intellectual status—led summary: to the necessity of meeting the challenges of science and , of Marxism, and of The Buddhist revival began, I believe, as an Christianity. It helped to bring about the revival of effort by laymen to reprint the scriptures destroyed in interest in Dharmalaksana, the birth of Buddhist the Taiping Rebellion [1857-64]. It gathered scientism, and participation in modern, Western momentum as the discovery of Western Buddhist forms of social welfare. It accentuated the fear of scholarship stimulated the need for Chinese Buddhist superstition and accelerated the shift from practice to study and from religion to philosophy.

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 8

These are the lines of pressure which shaped the external appearance of the Buddhist revival. Yet these cannot be the only forces at work. One thinks of the nineteenth-century revival and reforms of Buddhism in Siam, of the two-year conference of all Burmese Buddhists called by U Nu in 1954, and of the struggles to be understood made by the present-day Buddhists of South Vietnam, for whom Thich Nhat Hanh is so able a spokesman. Surely there is in all this stirring something more positive than defenses against Western influence. Yet this influence has been a touchstone which exposes weakness, and Mr. Welch, in detailing Buddhist responses, is both friendly and just. Actually, he is again and again the defender of the Buddhists against careless and sometimes malicious reports, and gives his readers many reasons for realizing that both the Buddhist monasteries of China and Buddhist laymen throughout the land have contributed elements of balance, goodness, and even "therapy" to a country sorely in need of all three, and may continue to do so.

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 9

COMMENTARY As alternatives to existing urban public ALTERNATIVES TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS schools, Dr. Clark proposes regional state schools, federal regional schools, college- and THE argument of Kenneth Clark (see "Children") university-related open schools, schools financed for new schools to replace the existing ones in the by private industry, schools sponsored by labor cities deserves further development. Precisely unions, and Army schools such as those which because of the schools' bigness, a new beginning is have already repaired some of the damage done by necessary. This is not so much a "moral" as a the public schools to teen-agers. practical question. The resistance to change of Wide attention to these alternatives could large organizations is notorious, and in this case have a profoundly loosening-up effect on people's demonstrated by what Harold Gores says about thinking about education. Who knows but that, in big city schools, as well as evidenced by Kenneth time, some of the simple suggestions of Paul Clark's observations concerning the bad habits Goodman, as for example the one for store-front imposed on city educators and administrators neighborhood schools, might get a try. from the start. Dr. Clark continues: If this is true—if our system of training and promotion rewards the wrong characteristics—then our hopes for reform are minimal, if not totally futile. In short, we are in bad shape if reform is dependent upon the present educational establishment. To save our urban schools, we must first demonstrate to the public that the present level of public school inefficiency has reached a stage of public calamity. It must be demonstrated that minority-group children are not the only victims of the monopolistic inefficiency of the present system, but that white children—privileged white children, whose parents understandably seek to protect them by moving to suburbs and enrolling them in private and parochial schools—also suffer, both potentially and immediately. One way to change this situation, Dr. Clark thinks, would be to end the complacent security of existing public school systems as "protected monopolies." He lists seven sorts of schools which might be established to compete with the public schools, and so grade up the entirety of education in the United States. (This would not be the first time an intelligent social community adopted this policy. Many years ago, the Danish government gave no-strings-attached subsidies to the Danish folk schools for adult education as a means of setting higher standards for that nation's public schools. Measures of this sort are simply educational common sense.)

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 10

of others have been attended to. So long as CHILDREN this remains true, school programs will continue to . . . and Ourselves draw heavily on white middle-class assumptions. SCHOOLS IN THE CITIES The essence of the struggle, therefore, has been to help the Black and poor residents of the ghettos IN July, 1967, a five-day conference on "The understand that the present system, in the last Schoolhouse in the City" was held at Stanford analysis, was organized for the protection of University, through the cooperation of the "others"—not Black Americans. Indeed, it has been Educational Facilities Laboratories. A total of established fairly conclusively on the basis of ethnic thirty-nine papers were presented by authorities composition, performance scores, per capita expenditures, teacher turnover and assignments, and representing many levels of educational activity. the figures on up-grading of minority-group staff, that A book with the same title as the conference many large urban complexes have, in fact, dual (Praeger, 1968) presents seventeen of these school systems—one white and one Black but both papers, with an introduction by Alvin Toffler, who controlled by whites. edited the volume. (The paper of the greatest The minority-group student thus finds himself general interest and usefulness is likely to be in the curious position of being miseducated by a Bayard Rustin's contribution, "The Mind of the system that represent everybody's interests but his. Black Militant.") Such students are ordered to attend school under compulsory education laws seemingly for the express Except by readers already involved in the purpose of being convinced of their own heroic tasks and frustrations of urban education, uneducability. Those Black students who were able to who will want to study it carefully, this book may negotiate the schools had to adopt the views of their oppressors. They had to listen to discussions of serve best simply as an object-lesson in the history that highlighted the honesty of George enormous complexities of any sort of reform in Washington but not the fact that he was a slave- areas of high population concentration, especially owner. In short, the Wasp model was substituted for when the situations to be remedied are more one with which Black students could more readily defined by the pain they produce than by the light identify. of a beckoning vision. Two papers in particular It is this tendency to deliver generalized white illustrate the difficulties which arise when attempts products into specialized Black communities that set to improve the urban schools become foci of the stage for the thrust by Black communities to take control of the schools set up to serve their children. political controversy. Preston R. Wilcox reports what happened when the parents of the children in The other paper, "Decentralizing Urban Public School I.S. 201 in New York sought School Systems," by Mario D. Fantini and Richard control over the school's administration. We Magat, deals more widely with the movement for quote only the background issues, which are put local control, in terms of the Bundy Report made clearly: late in 1967 to the New York State Legislature by a Committee headed by McGeorge Bundy. Its Why do Black people seek control over their local schools? After watching the failures of the proposals for decentralization and "increased present school system, they have concluded that those community awareness and participation in the in control of the system define its objectives in terms educational process" ignited passions that reached of white America. The present authorities use such national proportions—gaining support, phrases as "the entire system" or "Negroes aren't the surprisingly enough, from Max Rafferty in only ones who need better schools." Activists, however, recognize these as euphemisms for California, three thousand miles away! Two maintenance of the degrading status quo. The tragic conclusions seem evident. One is that the Bundy fact is that, regardless of intentions Black Americans Report embodies an idea whose time has come. are not treated as full participants in the society but The other is that application of the idea will be essentially as a group to be considered after the against the bureaucratic grain of the educational

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 11 establishment and will therefore be hesitant and effective education for all children." The only slow. The comment of Harold B. Gores, workable alternative, in his opinion, is completely president of Educational Facilities Laboratories, new schools. on the failure of urban school systems to adapt themselves to the advantages of even physical innovation (in school building design, etc.) could be broadened to apply at all levels of educational advance. After listing numerous good school facilities developed outside of big city limits across the country, he said: Our cities are too complex in their decision- making to respond quickly to advances in the state of the art. From the record, it would appear that the bigger the school district, the less likely it can grasp the advantages of technological progress. The rest of the book is largely preparation for appreciating the proposals of Kenneth Clark, in "Alternatives to Urban Public Schools." The hard common sense of establishing other kinds of schools, in preference to a long and probably failing struggle to better the existing ones, seems self-evident. Dr. Clark exposes and rejects the rhetorical elements in debates about the schools. As professor of psychology at City College in New York, and chairman and staff director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Haryou), Dr. Clark probably knows the problems of the ghetto and its schools as well as any man in the United States. "Our urban schools," he says, "are spawning hundreds of thousands of functional illiterates who are incapable of playing a constructive role in our society and who cannot be integrated into the economy without costly remedial education, even in such basics as reading and arithmetic." Efforts at remedying this situation, he says, are "blocked by the rationalizations and self-serving explanations of many educators." Mainly at fault is "the selective process involved in the training and promoting educators and administrators for our public schools"—a process, he says, which "emphasizes qualities of passivity, conformity, caution, smoothness, and superficial affability, rather than boldness, creativity, and ability to and obtain those things that are essential for solid and

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 12

FRONTIERS he can for the rest of us. Woven into his account of the behavior of the Czechs under Soviet Their Humanity Was Showing political domination are numerous strands of PEOPLE in large numbers sometimes reveal their Czech history. You get the impression that the quality—that is, their humanity—in the Czechs are among the most civilized of the circumstances of sudden change. A collapse of Europeans and that if a present-day case for the the authority under which the members of a excellence of European culture can be made, the society order their lives may disclose what sort of Czechs may be the people who will supply the people they are—whether or not they practice an most evidence: inner ordering. It is always worth while to If the Soviet invasion was a military classic, the wonder how the people of a community would Czech resistance was (and is) a psychological behave if the Black Plague, or a Pied Piper, or masterpiece; very possibly, though it is too soon to be unexpected great wealth, came to town. Or an sure, approaching an innovation in mass behavior. overwhelmingly powerful military invader. How The Czechs didn't fight, in Western man's sense of fight—that is, with spiked clubs, paving blocks or would Middletown, U.S.A., have coped with a atomic bombs. They capitulated. But the manner of Nazi occupation? It is fair to say that no sort of their capitulation may prove and in some respects pretense does any good when things like that already has proved, to have been a glorious victory. happen. People show what they are really made Well, the Czechs didn't go down fighting, but of, and the situation seldom gives them more than they did resist. They exhibited a somewhat one try. neglected aspect of the dignity of man. Human Milton Mayer's account of what happened in sensibility proves its survival in the form of Czechoslovakia after the Soviet tanks rolled humor. This is one of Mayer's main points: Why across the border on August 21, 1968, is is it that tough-guy defense of human dignity concerned with such matters. His Occasional almost always dulls a people's sense of humor? Paper, The Art of the Impossible, published last That a man without arms is still a whole man is April by the Center for the Study of Democratic one of the Czech's demonstrations, even though, Institutions, seeks general enlightenment from the as Mayer points out, there is no love in their ways in which the humanity of the Czechs came hearts, just now, for the Russians. into view during their ordeal—an ordeal which What had happened? In 1946 the Czechs now continues. voted to install a Communist government. They After all, what other really good reason have got a Stalinist government which lasted until we for studying history? Important to us is not Czechoslovakian Communist reformers overthrew just "human behavior," but behavior for the best the Novotny regime in January, 1968. They reasons. If it becomes evident that people can do thought that at last their long peonage to the well for the best reasons, then we need worry far Soviet economy was ended. As Mayer briefly less about what they may do for bad reasons. We tells: can concentrate on giving them good, better, best Inside Comecon the Czechs were the great reasons. creditor nation with something like a billion dollars piled up, but they could not lay their hands on the Milton Mayer is an articulate Humanist, hard they needed to modernize their Pacifist, and Christian—we are not sure about the industrial plant. Unlike those of Russia, Germany, order, and it probably doesn't matter. He is and Japan, the Czech factories had not been rebuilt uniquely qualified by personal experience to write after the War but were, instead, to be retooled with about the Czechoslovakian revolt, to try to divine baling wire to meet the Russian heavy industry its meaning, and to find in it what encouragement . In the Spring of '68 Dubcek asked the

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 13

Russians for a half-billion-dollar hard currency loan, a comfortable gain, while profit, preferment, and which of course meant capital goods purchases in the exemption are negotiated 'mid the bombs bursting in West. The Russians replied—with tanks in August, air. It was a union without any trace of the after the Czechs had brazenly asserted they would get compulsion and repression that war invariably credits wherever they could. . . . On the night of introduces in the name of unity. It was a union of an August 20-21 when they were kidnapped and taken to ungoverned nation, an instant consensus that threw Moscow, the Czech Communist leaders took the cure up instant bridges between the deep social divisions. . in one massive dose. The cure, that is, of Russia— . . not of Communism. But they took it quietly. Was what they did "non-violence"? In a way. The Czechs were not heroes, in the same At any rate it had the form of non-violence. It sense that the Danes under the Nazi occupation wasn't the classical non-violence of a Gandhi. It were not heroes. They precipitated no genocidal was non-violence of the means. Better than proceedings. But they acted like men, just as the violence, Mayer thinks. And to assume a virtue if Danes had acted like men. Mayer is exceedingly you have it not—although there wasn't any fond of the Czechs. He has spent a number of pretense to virtue in this instance—sometimes years in their country, since 1946 and before gives people ideas about the desirability of virtue August, 1968, teaching and preaching. His per se. But the mood, well— articles on the ordeal of the Czech Christians . . . what are we to say of a people who wrote on under Communism, his understanding and their walls in August, "Soviet Circus Back in Town— admiration of Joseph Hromadka of the Comenius Do not Feed or Annoy the Animals"? The Czechs Theological Faculty in Prague (see Mayer's book, taunted the Russians. They mocked the Russians. What Can a Man Do?), make superb humanistic They scorned the Russians. They defied the Russians. reporting, and much more than reporting. Here, They harassed the Russians. They starved the in this story of the Czech resistance, the Russians. They ignored the Russians. They avoided the Russians. . . . circumstances are those of the politics of power, but the content is the excellences of powerless Nonviolence is a frame of heart: What was in the Czech heart as the tanks came thundering through men. There is also cultural history. The their streets? The corollary of nonresistance to evil is, performance of the Czech people seems to Mayer "Overcome evil with good." The presupposition of to combine the courage of John Huss, the humor nonviolent resistance is love of the evildoer. "To of Good Soldier Schweik, and the insight of Franz love," says Aquinas, "is to will the good of the other." Kafka. When, in August, the Russians invaded Love's object, when the other is doing evil, is his their country with half a million troops, the deliverance from his evildoing: his redemption. I have not seen, read of, or heard of a Czech who loved Czechs, it seemed, became as one man-and-a-half: the Russians on August 21; not in St. Thomas's sense. August 21 handed them as a gift what they had And yet, as Mayer says, the Czech resistance never stirred themselves to achieve; their nation unified as few nations I can think of ever have been. "bore the character, if not the principle, of non- It united Communist, non-Communist, and anti- violence, the practice without theory." However, Communist in a front not of parties but of persons. . . there is also this, that in the history of . It was a universal union of volunteers, without a Czechoslovakia there was a man, Petr Chelcicky, conscript among them. It was not a crossed-finger who found nonviolence in the Gospels and wrote union of war with its hollow assertion that "we are all about it, four hundred years before 1876, the year Englishmen (or Americans or Frenchmen or Germans) now," the union of politics-as-usual in which Tolstoy changed his life, and in which he transparently plastered over by coalition while the read Chelcicky. And there is this: struggle for domestic power proceeds apace, while the After August Czech students and young black battens, while the class distinctions are workers—undifferentiated between believers and exacerbated by the sharp division between those who nonbelievers—debated and discussed nonviolence serve at an uncomfortable loss and those who serve at everywhere. And in late November, when the

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969 14

Government called them in and begged them not to demonstrate in the streets, 65,000 university students "struck" nonviolently in their dormitories for seventy- six hours without incident, and the strike posters in front of Comenius Theological Faculty included a proclamation which just might be the handwriting on the wall: Nonviolent resistance against injustice and despotism is the only way of carrying forward the truth. The use of violence is madness. Returning evil for evil leads to hatred and war which employs any and every means of vanquishing the adversary. The issue is not the conquest of the adversary, "victory." The issue is the victory of valid truth binding the black as the white, the good as the wicked, the conservative as the liberal, the student as the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. But good soldier Schweik is also making his contribution. He understands the full import of "the Brezhnev doctrine" and how it must be respected. The Brezhnev doctrine, precipitated by the daring of the Czechs in acting like an independent nation, declared that "the sovereignty of each socialist country can not be opposed to the interests of the world of socialism, of the world revolutionary movement." Mayer quotes Schweik's assessment: "You see," a Czech friend of mine said, "the Brezhnev doctrine places a very heavy responsibility upon us Czechs. If we find that socialism is endangered in the Soviet Union, the new doctrine requires us to invade it."

Volume XXII, No. 33 MANAS Reprint August 13, 1969